Awakening
Related material
Images
The Marseilles card
The Waite-Smith card
A Transcendental Card
The four transdendental cards, Awakening, The Chariot, Tempering and The Lovers, don't fit in any one stage of the journey. Rather, their influence is felt throughout. I have included them in the stage where their influence is strongest.
Note that these four cards are direct counterbalances to the four "Hell" cards.
The Image
Traditionally called Judgement (sic), a better name for this card is Awakening, The Awakening of the Dead, or even The Call to Adventure. The card usually depicts several humans variously in boxes, coffins or sometimes underwater. These symbols all refer to the physical realm. Above them is an “angel” holding a trumpet. As the Tarot cards were overlaid with a Christian veneer long ago, this being is often identified as Gabriel “blowing his horn.” The same figure is depicted more anciently by Krishna in Hindu art, who is depicted with a flute. As we shall see, the figure is merely a personification of impulses, calls, “sounds” or messages of diverse nature which come from the spiritual realms in which our mundane world is embedded. In different words, these messages come to us from outside our normal lives; they are apart from our jobs, our families and our pastimes. They can appear to us as hunches, coincidences, impossibilities, even accidents. They were called “B” influences by Boris Mouravieff, as opposed to “A” influences which come from inside life—who we meet, what happens to us in the course of a day and so on.
The Fool is one who has started paying attention to these subtle influences, and one who even seeks them out, for example, in meditation and practices designed to enhance immediate awareness of one’s self and surroundings. For it is precisely these “B” influences which reach us in the ordinary world. They are Spirit’s way of trying to get our attention. Sometimes this is successful, but usually it is not. Those who are “dead” do not heed these subtle signals, which is the exact meaning of this word in esotericism. Gabriel’s horn calls us to awaken to the larger, non-manifest world around and within us. The Fool’s goal is to bring these messages into conscious focus. With heightened awareness the next card, The Moon Pool, can be entered with understanding and without losing one’s bearings.
This card contains another secret: the horn itself. The horn represents the human spinal column, which the Marseilles card suggests. “Awakening the spinal cord” means awakening the kundalini energy which lies at its base. This is the goal of many systems of yoga and is well-known in the East. There is even a school of yoga called nada yoga, where “nada” means an inner or unstruck sound that one is able to hear as an advanced practitioner.